


the exorcism of agatha howell

by iihappydaysii



Series: Happydays Spooky Week [2]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Dan has a wife in this, Dark, Demons, Exorcism, F/M, Historical, Horror, M/M, Mentions of Sex, Murder, Read at Your Own Risk, Religious Horror, but a lot for fic, but there is tension, depictions of hanging, happydays spooky week, i don't actually know a lot about priests and such, i don't really mention his sexuality, like early 1900s, not that bad as far as horror goes, obviously this is just fiction, phil is a priest, they're not really together in this, vague mentions of homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-12 22:23:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21233534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iihappydaysii/pseuds/iihappydaysii
Summary: After exhausting all other options to help his increasingly erratic wife, Dan turns to a priest named Father Philip for help.





	the exorcism of agatha howell

**Author's Note:**

> happydays spooky week #2

Over the sound of the scratching and the rain, Dan heard a knock on his front door. He walked from where he had been pacing in the foyer to open the door.

With a backdrop of heavy rain, a man was stood on his porch clad in all black but for the white square of his collar tucked up underneath his Adam’s apple. The man was pale, almost too pale, with a head of black-as-night hair. He’d never seen this stranger before, but Dan was grateful to see him now. He quickly ushered the man inside.

“Thank you for coming, Father,” Dan said, shutting the door. "I wasn’t sure what else to do.”

“I understand,” replied Father Philip, Dan had learned of his name on the phone with the rectory earlier. “We are either someone’s first resort or their last.”

There was something comforting about the man’s tone. Usually men of the cloth made Dan feel uncomfortable, exposed, judged. But tonight, he was just grateful to not be alone, to have a plan. Even if that plan was as bizarre as exorcism.

Father Philip glanced a photograph on the wall. It was one from their wedding. Agatha always looked so beautiful in white with her long dark hair. “Your wife is lovely,” the Father said.

“She is,” Dan said, though he struggled not to say _she was. _She looked the same now, though paler. It wasn’t the outside that was no longer lovely

“Tell me, what’s been going on with her, please?”

Dan felt a lump form in his throat. Of course he knew this was coming. This was the reason Priest Philip had ventured out here in this terrible storm, but knowing he had to talk about it, didn’t make actually speaking of it any easier. Still, he forced out the words, “She’s different… at first I thought it was just the stress of the move, but then, as we settled in, things just got worse. She became angrier, cross all the time, not just at me, but at everyone. She threw a drink on a waitress because it wasn’t cold enough.”

The move and Dan’s change of work was hard on everyone, but it just didn’t explain what was happening, even in the beginning, and certainly not now.

“And this is unusual?” Priest Philip asked.

“Is it normal where you’re from?” Dan spoke back, immediately regretting the tone he’d taken. Sometimes he felt as if Agatha’s dark demeanor would get on to him like fleas, but he guessed it wasn’t fair to blame her for his own shortcomings.

The priest tilted his head and looked at him with a soft concern that made Dan squirm. “I’m sorry, Mr. Howell, I simply meant is this a complete change in her behavior or an escalation?”

Dan broke the eye contact and looked down at his shoes. “It’s a change. Agatha was always kind, not cruel. I always felt she was too kind, actually… I was worried she’d get taken advantage of. Now, I’d give anything to have her back as she was. She’s hateful now in ways I couldn’t even imagine before. I’m… no offense, Father… I’m not much of a believer, but the things she says sometimes, the… blasphemies, deeply upset even someone like me.”

With his confession, Dan expected at least of hint of judgement to pass over Father Philip’s face, but still, Dan could read only concern.

“Was Mrs. Howell a believer?” the priest asked.

A small smile flickered across Dan’s face. He’d always admired Agatha’s openness, even though he did not share it. She used to get so excited about things unseen, the possibility of more beyond just what could be touched. “Yes, though I guess you could say she believed in everything. Agatha, she’s educated, widely read, and she dabbled in all of it.”

This time the priest did frown, his head titled slightly. “By all of it, do you mean the occult?”

Dan bit on the side of his thumb and turned his back to Father Philip. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t admit this to a man of the cloth. He did not enjoy the judgment or scorn of others, but he needed help. Agatha needed help—and full disclosure may be his only hope.

“She was curious…” he said, nervously. “I thought it was silly. She thought it was fascinating. We took a trip to Louisiana last year. I wanted to drink and enjoy the nightlife on Bourbon Street, but I couldn’t get her out of the damn swamps.”

He’d liked Bourbon Street, though he hadn’t imagined carrying it with him forever in the way that he had. On a late night, under a gas lamp, he’d seen two men kissing. Kissing like they were in love. He imagined they must’ve been so in love, recklessly so, to have risked their safety like that. It was the first time Dan had ever seen that—two men kissing— and to this day he couldn’t get the image out of his head.

“Curiosity can be dangerous,” Father Philip had said—and, for a horrifying moment, Dan worried he’d mentioned the men aloud, but then he realized he had not, and the priest was merely commenting on Agatha.

“Anyway,” Dan continued, when he noticed the priest was waiting on him. “Everything seemed fine, until we moved and she started changing. She’d always worked, but she stopped that. I once brought up our plans to have a child and she threw a wine bottle at my head.” Dan left out how even after that though, she’d begged him for sex. She’d bent over the bed and pulled the skirt of her dress over her hips. _Fuck me like a whore, _she’d said, then laughed. Just laughed. Dan ran out of the house and down to the pub where he drank until he blacked out. “Not long after that, she got sick. Really sick. Couldn’t even get out of bed, but every doctor we saw said there was nothing wrong with her. Then, we brought in the psychologists who diagnosed her with some bullshit called ‘hysteria”. We tried their pills and therapies, but she only got sicker and angrier. Eventually, one of them suggested lobotomy. If chopping off a piece of my wife’s fucking brain is all science has… I guess the man upstairs is all that’s left.”

He looked sympathetically at Dan again, his gaze lingering in a way that made chills spread across his skin like spider legs. “Do you know exactly what happened in those swamps? Were you there? I think it’s best if we go into this knowing as much as possible.”

“I wasn’t always there. Maybe if I had been… at first, it seemed like the normal stuff she got into. Spirit boards and seances. She used to see this psychic who uses tarot cards and numerology.”

“You allowed this?” Father Philip asked.

Dan snorted. “I forget you don’t know Agatha. No one allows or disallows her from anything. Besides, it’s all nonsense, right? What could possibly be the harm?”

Father Philip shook his head. “You’re right. Most of it is nonsense, but it’s a numbers game, as they say. The longer you dabble in the occult, the more likely you are to land on something that isn’t.”

Maybe that was what happened: Agatha destroyed by her own curiosity and whatever magic brewed out there in the Louisiana swamps.

“Is there anything you can remember?” the priest continued. “Anything particularly unusual in what she was into? I know voodoo is practiced in the region.”

Cold rushed over Dan like a winter wind. There was something—someone or someones—that _were_ different. He’d heard tales of voodoo before coming to Louisiana. Stories of a pagan religion brought over from Haiti. He’d even seen shops with unusual dolls hanging in the windows. But this wasn’t voodoo. It was… as the owners of one of those shops had told him… the thing they were trying to hold back.

They were so vague about it. Like speaking of it would give it power, but to Agatha, vagueness was mystery and once she sank her teeth into a mystery, she wouldn’t let go.

“Mr. Howell?” the priest prompted.

“The witches.”

“So you wife took up with voodoo practitioners?”

“No.” Dan shook his head. “They were the ones that warned us about them. The witches. There were two women and man. They were… I don’t know how to explain them. I met them once and I wished I hadn’t. I never wanted to see them again. But my wife, she enjoyed their company and they seemed to enjoy hers. We were there for two weeks, and she increased our stay to three. When I tried to argue it, she’d screamed at me. It was… I’d never seen her like that. She’d go out after breakfast and not return until after three or four in the morning. I’d try to get her to stay, do something else, but she’d always go back to the witches. They called themselves that, the witches. They were young. I thought they were silly and stupid.” A thought struck Dan suddenly. A picture his wife had taken of one of the witches, the man. He was young and thing, more bones than anything else. But still kind of… beautiful, he guessed. It was odd. He was an odd thing to look at. But whenever he looked at that picture, that man was all he could look at it. “One moment…” Dan said.

He walked into the parlor and searched the bookshelf for one of their photo albums. He flipped through it until he found the image he was looking for. The witch, shirtless, smoking a cigarette and standing on the swamp bank. The man had a symbol, branded into his skin. It wasn’t anything he’d seen before, but all the witches had them. He slid the photo out of the album and walked back towards the entryway.

He bumped into the priest, startling him.

“My apologies,” he said, looking up into the priest’s eyes. They were sunny, somehow. Despite all the darkness around them. Dan wasn’t moving back and neither was the priest. It was a strange paralysis, broken only by a loud thump upstairs.

Dan stepped back, holding his breath. Trembling, he held out the photo to Father Philip. “This is one of them. They all had this weird symbol on them. Does it mean anything to you?”

The priest took the photo and looked down at it. The sun in his eyes burned out. He looked back up at Dan.

“We need to run.”

“_What?_”

There was another loud thud upstairs.

“Keep your voice down and we walk out the door, we walk down the street and we don’t ever look back.”

“What’s wrong with you? What about Agatha? I asked you here to help my wife.”

“I don’t have time to explain,” the priest sounded angry now. “But I have strong reason to believe whatever upstairs is not your wife.”

“So she’s possessed? That’s why you’re here.”

“She’s not possessed. I’m sorry Dan, but you need to look at the picture again.”

“The picture? I told you I don’t know what the symbol is.”

“I do,” the priest replied, darkly. “But I’m not talking about the symbol. Look at the picture.”

“No!” Dan shouted, a surge of anger powering. “I’ve seen the goddamn picture.”

“And because of what’s upstairs you haven’t been able to accept it? To really _look _at it. But it’s time, Daniel.”—another crash upstairs—“I know that symbol and I know what it means. We _have_ to leave and we can’t do it unless you really _see _that picture.”

Dan was struggling to breathe, his heart pounding. He hated this priest. He wanted to scream at him, hit him, anything to make him go away. God, he wanted to take that photograph and fling it into the fire.

“You’re a coward,” Dan spat. “Shouldn’t you have God on your side? If you want to go, go. I’ll find a way to save my wife on my own.”

“I won’t leave without you,” Father Philip said, softly. “You already know what’s in the picture, don’t you Mr. Howell? It’s why you knew you needed to show me. But it’s just too much, isn’t it? For unbeliever like you to believe.” He held the photo out to him again, and there was something about his voice and about the thrashing upstairs and the last several months of torture, that had Dan reaching for the photo and looking down at it.

There he was—the shirtless, blond witch with the symbol on his skin, the banks of a murky swamp, an old shack on a little island of land, with a looming cypress behind it. A rope hung from one of the thick, low branches and at the end of the rope was Agatha, her neck broken, dead eyes staring straight at him.

_The goddamn witches killed Agatha._

Dan felt dizzy, lightheaded, as he looked up at Father Philip. Fear was a sour vinegar curdling the blood in his veins. He felt himself begin to topple, but the priest caught him before he could, holding him up, steadying him with strong hands. He felt delirious in this moment, unsure of anything, terrified, and yet the image that came to his mind now, here with this priest, were the two men kissing on Bourbon Street.

Father Philip opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, a voice echoed from behind them. It was Agatha’s voice, but Dan knew now, it was not Agatha. “Darling,” the imposter spoke. “You didn’t tell me we had a visitor?”

Dan looked over the priest shoulder and there, he saw the unspeakable: his wife, floating the air, a rope tied around her neck, suspended above her but attached to nothing, her neck was broken, her eyes nothing but the whites and she was grinning, coldly, though her feet were kicking like they’d have been when she was struggling for her life.

Clutching his rosary beads, Father Philip turned toward the horrific image and stuttered out, “Who are you?”

“You know me dear Philip,” the thing said, no longer in Agatha’s voice, but something dark and deep, something that was one voice, and a thousand voices. “I am the one that fell from heaven like lighting.”

“What?” Dan’s voice shook. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Tell him, _Father,_” it hissed. “I want you to say it. Tell him who I am.”

Father Philip said nothing, just stared back clutching his rosary.

The thing shot forward in a flash, now inches from the priest’s face. Everything smelled putrid, like rotting flesh and sulfur. “_Say my name!_” it howled.

“Lucifer.”


End file.
